Readers' comments

Four convictions based on confessions after years of inprisonment with torture. I still have a hard job believing that half a platoon of half trained Arabs could hijack four aircraft the same day. I do not think a full platoon of crack SAS troops could pull that off even with the full support of authorities. Forget delivering them on target without interception having crossed a dozen states or more.

I think GITMO should be turned into a detention centre for those who commit crimes against humanity & genocide. People like Bush, Chenay, Greenspan, Wall Street moghuls & Corporate CEOs involved in blatant embezzlement, affecting the lives & livelihood of hundreds or thousands of their stakeholders.

There is ABSOLUTELY NO EVIDENCE to back up this statement, both in the narrow topic of prisoner handling to the broader matter of how to persecute the war on terror.

True, mr Obama ended waterboarding. That said, he has greatly stepped up the Predator attacks in the AfPak regions.

So, the Economist thinks waterboarding three known and confessed terrorists is a moral outrage, but killing dozens of suspected terrorists, quite likely along with their families and other unrelated people, well, that's just mr Obama making tough decisions! Can't you see how nonsensical this posture is?

Either treat the conflict as war, where irregular combatants like the ones held in Guantanamo have absolutely no rights whatsoever and could legally be shot immediately (as irregular German and Allied combatants in WW2 were, to no great protest by either side), or treat it as a criminal case, where the Predator attacks are far more egregious than the waterboarding.

The Bush administration really is to blame for this. They should never have started this military tribunal sham, because it makes people think that these are criminals that have rights. They are not criminals. They are irregular combatants which have no rights under any statute in the world.

The US prosecution system engages in this type of manipulation of the justice system all the time:

A person accused of murder finds himself with the option of pleading guilty and getting a life sentence with no parole, or pleading not guilty and possibly ending up getting capital punishment (ie killed). Does anyone actually think this is fair?

It shows that although you may exercise your constitutional right to trial by jury you can count on being severely punished for it.